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Monica Angelotti
angelotti.monica@bls.gov
Monica Angelotti is an economist in the Office of
Employment and Unemployment Statistics, U.S.
Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Inequality in the United States and abroad:
sources and paths forward
Income and wealth inequality are topics of many
impassioned debates, both in the United States and
abroad. As income and wealth distributions have become
more unequal in recent decades, people are asking, (1)
Why is inequality rising? and (2) What can we do to reverse
that rise?
If you are interested in these questions, you may want to
read The Political Economy of Inequality: U.S. and Global
Dimensions. Edited by Sisay Asefa and Wei-Chiao Huang,
the book features contributions from six authors, each
discussing a different aspect of inequality. The authors use
a mix of economic and political theory, as well as economic
data, to substantiate their analyses. While some chapters
are accessible to a wider audience, others are tailored
toward readers with a deeper understanding of statistics.
Chapters 2–4 and 7 deal with topics of inequality in the
United States, whereas chapters 5 and 6 discuss inequality
abroad, in low-income countries. Because the chapters
cover distinct topics and follow no specific order, this review
groups them geographically, opening the discussion with
chapters focusing on the United States.
Chapter 3, by Charles L. Ballard, provides a good overview
of the history of income inequality in the United States,
categorizing the main stages of that history as the Great
Convergence and the Great Divergence. The Great
Convergence, generally the period from the 1920s to the
1970s, was characterized by a decreasing share of total
income received by the very top income stratum, indicating
more equality. After the 1970s, however, the United States
saw a gradual “disequalization” of income, entering the
period of the Great Divergence, with the income distribution
becoming increasingly top heavy. Ballard lists the political
January 2022
U.S